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THE SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS
THE DECALOGUE
The Ten Commandments, or Decalogue, given by God to Moses following the liberation of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, appear in two versions (Exod. 20.2– 17, Deut. 5.6–21). There are in fact fourteen or fifteen injunctions and different traditions arrange them in various ways; thus Jews regard the opening statement (“I am the Lord your God”) as the first commandment, while Roman Catholics and Lutherans combine this with the injunctions against other gods and idols to make the first commandment. Perhaps the most significant issue in translation is whether the commandments forbid killing in general or just murder in particular.
Moses Destroying the Tablets of the Law, by Rembrandt (1659). On Mt. Sinai God gave Moses two tablets bearing the commandments, but Moses smashed them in anger on finding that the Hebrews had erected a golden idol (Exod. 32.19). He later returned to Mt. Sinai and received two new tablets.
Christian ethics arose from three principal sources: the practices and scriptures of the Jewish world, particularly the Old Testament; the dominant Hellenistic culture of the early Christian era; and reflection on the life, words, deeds, and death of Jesus in the light of the radical transformation brought about by experiences and reports of his resurrection. The first and third of these sources remain, but the second has expanded to include the many cultures with which Christianity has had contact to the present day, as well as the history of philosophical ethics. Old Testament ethics include the understanding of God as creator and the discovery that the creator God longs to set his people free and live in a covenantal relationship with
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them. The covenant is most explicitly embodied in the Ten Commandments (see sidebar), although it is anticipated in God’s covenants with Noah (Gen. 9) and Abraham (Gen. 12, 15, 17). On the other hand are the Old Testament traditions of prophet, priest, and king. The prophet calls the people back to the covenant made with God. The priest seeks to embody that relationship in patterns of holiness and worship. The king epitomizes the aspirations and complexities of Israel’s life under God: the definitive king is David. Early Christians quickly perceived that Jesus fulfilled these Old Testament roles: thus the Temptation (Matt. 3, Luke 4) shows him being tempted into different kinds of prophetic, priestly, and kingly ministry. Those emphasizing Jesus’ role as king have tended to seek ways in which the church could be involved in governing the whole of society, drawing on such narratives as those of David and Solomon. Christians who have stressed Jesus’ priestly role have often focused on his death on the cross and its unique role in bringing about eternal salvation: the ethical implications have tended to be harder to see. Those who have focused on Jesus’ role as prophet have tended to turn to the gospel accounts of his ministry of teaching—especially the Beatitudes (see box)—and healing rather than the cross alone.
THE BEATITUDES The Beatitudes, recorded rather differently by Matthew (5.3– 12) and Luke (6.20–26), are at the heart of Jesus’ teaching. The name derives from the Latin for “blessing” (beatitudo). Matthew’s Beatitudes, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7), are a somewhat spiritualized version of the promises recorded by Luke in his Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6.20–49). Where Luke says “poor” and “hungry,” Matthew says “poor in spirit” and “hungry for righteousness.”
The difference of emphasis today between those who see Christian ethics as primarily about social relations and those who see it as keeping oneself fit for heaven has therefore been there since the very beginning. The theme that tends to unite these contrasting emphases is the “kingdom [or reign] of God.” This is the world that the parables and healings depict, a world anticipated by personal holiness and struggles for right relations, but fundamentally ushered in not in our way at our time but in God’s own way and at God’s chosen time. (See also pages 20–21.) Matthew’s Beatitudes emphasize future consolation amid present struggle. While all of the verses have inspired movements in the history of the church, perhaps the most influential has been the sixth (“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God”), with its notion of the vision of God as the goal of Christian existence. The Church of the Beatitudes. An aerial view of the hill called the Mount of the Beatitudes, where Jesus is said to have preached the Sermon on the Mount, near Tabgha on Lake Galilee. The Franciscan church was built in 1938 close to the remains of a 4th-century chapel.
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CHRISTIAN LOVE: FAMILY AND SOCIETY HOUSEHOLD ETHICS The New Testament letters include lists of instructions based on contemporary Hellenistic household ethics. In Titus 2.2–6, for example, wives are told to be “self-controlled, chaste, good managers of the household, kind,” and “submissive to their husbands.” Given the origins of these conventions in Hellenistic cultural norms, Christians have long debated how far such instructions are truly grounded in God, and thus to what extent later generations should be bound by them. More recent controversy has focused on the role of women as church leaders and ministers (see box). The New Testament passages traditionally read as excluding women from certain roles have now been reevaluated. Slavery was apparently accepted as a fact of contemporary life for many centuries; since the eighteenth century, however, Christians have increasingly seen slavery as abhorrent within a Christian ethic of love.
Waiting for Freedom. Slaves wait for the proclamation abolishing slavery in the US to take effect at midnight on December 31, 1862. This painting by William T. Carlton (1816–1888) hangs in the White House room where Lincoln signed the proclamation.
When Paul speaks of “the body” (as at 1 Cor. 12.27) he means not an individual but the gathered community of believers as “the body of Christ.” The early descriptions of the community in Acts presuppose the life of a Mediterranean household, a much broader notion than simply family. But the most fundamental unit for the early Christians was church—the assembly (Greek ekklesia) of the faithful, where worship, social care, and fellowship were epitomized in the common meal. This meal crystallized the call to radical reappraisal of family relationships, commitments, and property ownership (Acts 2.42–47). Two references to love stand out in the New Testament for their influence on the history of Christian ethics. Jesus’ injunction “Love your enemies” (Luke 6.35) seems a clear indication that Christian love goes way beyond conventional mercy and generosity; and Paul’s famous hymn to love in 1 Corinthians, which ends with the words “faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13) has been taken by Aquinas and others as a cue to regard love as the “form of all the virtues.” However, it
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remains unclear how easily the radical kind of love envisaged in Luke sits alongside the love that Paul describes. Meanwhile a contrast runs through the New Testament concerning whether “love” refers to a general sense of well-being and communal care or to a much more radical reordering of conventional commitments in the light of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. The resurrected Jesus thrice asks Peter, “Do you love me?” (John 21.15– 23). The translation masks the variation in the Greek between fraternal love (philos) and a more genuinely selfless love (agape). Some have made a great deal of this distinction, and also referred to a third word (eros) as indicating a love centered on desire. Christian traditions have differed widely in viewing desire either as inherently holy (reflecting God’s desire for us) or as suspect (because assumed to be selfish or linked to lust). Christians in the West today commonly assume that the Bible prescribes a nuclear form of family life, but the nuclear family is in fact a very recent cultural development and Christian notions of family have changed with cultural patterns over the centuries. What has remained constant has been the emphasis on the home as a primary place for faith development, nurture, protection of the weak, and practical embodiments of Christian love.
FEMALE LEADERSHIP IN THE CHURCH One area where the household codes found in the New Testament (see sidebar) have proved controversial is gender and leadership. Some passages forbid female headship, such as “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent” (1 Tim. 2.12; compare 1 Cor. 14.34). But other passages seem to assume that women were active in the church in prominent ministerial roles, such as where Paul commends “our sister Phoebe, a deacon [or ‘minister’] of the church at Cenchreae” (Rom. 16.1). Evidence for female leadership is also found in nonChristian sources, such as a letter written ca. 112 to the emperor Trajan by Pliny the Younger, the Roman governor of Bithynia and Pontus in Asia Minor. In the course of a detailed account of his actions against Christians and their “depraved, excessive superstition,” Pliny states that he felt it “necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two The Rev. Rose Hudson-Wilkin celebrates the Eucharist at Holy Trinity Anglican church in Hackney, London. Today most Anglican provinces ordain women as deacons and priests, and a number, as in the US and Canada, allow for the ordination of women bishops.
female slaves who were called deacons [Latin: ministrae].” Some have disputed whether such passages indicate that women were in positions of authority. But the real issue for Christians has been whether or not the injunctions against female leadership are truly grounded in the new life made possible in Christ.
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POLITICS AND THE STATE
Jesus famously said, “Give to the emperor those things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12.17). Was Jesus making a significant distinction between spiritual and civil authority, or an ironic observation that all things are, in fact, God’s? Around this question revolve most issues of Christian political ethics. Jesus himself was surrounded by various models of interaction with a society under foreign occupation, including conformity (Sadducees and Herodians), political quietism (Pharisees), seclusion (Essenes), and violent militancy (Zealots). Each of these options has had its proponents throughout the history of the church. But Jesus apparently renounced all four. His politics seems to have been focused on his small group of disciples, on
“AN UNJUST LAW IS NO LAW”: RESISTING AUTHORITY With the demise of Christendom (see main text), Christian reflection on politics has focused less on the ethic of rule and more on patterns of resistance. The 1934 Barmen Declaration was written by Karl Barth (1886–1968), Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), and others in the Confessing Church of Nazi Germany to counter the nationalism and antisemitism of the state-controlled “German Christian” movement, rejecting
the idea that the church could be subject to any authority but Christ. Another such statement was the Kairos Document (1985) by black South African theologians—a landmark text in liberation theology that advocates “prophetic” theology and criticizes what it calls “state” and “church” theology. The text that most overshadows political questions for Christians is Romans 13.1–4, where Paul enjoins readers to be subject to civil authority. It is unclear how far Paul’s own presumed execution by an oppressive regime (in Rome, ca. 64) qualifies his statement that “rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad,” and debate has raged about whether Paul’s words apply in situations where a government is tyrannical. For example, Thomas Aquinas’ words “an unjust law is no law at all” were famously cited by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., during the US civil rights era in the 1960s. Denouncing injustice. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speaks to a crowd at the March Against Fear rally on the steps of the Mississippi State Capitol in June 1966. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was dedicated to nonviolent resistance to racism.
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friendship with the poor, and on critically engaging those in authority: and most of all, on the way of the cross. The latter was a rejection of conformity, quietism, and militancy; but Jesus’ movement constituted a sufficient political threat for him to be executed on political grounds (see page 24). augustine’s “city of god” Once Christianity became a formidable public force, it needed a political theology to match. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) provided it. In his City of God, he explains that everything in human, secular history, no matter how adverse, is an advance in sacred history. Thus the pagan Roman emperors advanced the sacred story by bringing so many peoples under one rule; even the Visigoths’ sack of Rome in 410, which shocked the Roman world, would be seen to have a place in sacred history. This model offered Christians in the ensuing millennium a way to understand their relationship to the civil powers. In the medieval period attention focused on the relationship between the pope and the Holy Roman emperor, most notably in the Investiture Controversy (see page 39). Much Christian reflection on politics has assumed that the human person has two dimensions—body and soul—and that it is the latter which lives eternally with God. Thus Martin Luther (1483–1546) described the two realms: the spiritual realm is the freedom and equality of one’s eternal life before God, governed through the preaching of the word and sharing the sacraments. The worldly realm is one’s fleeting life before humanity, constrained by laws enforced by rulers. The two realms simply have separate spheres. The approach to civil authority of another great reformer, John Calvin (1509–1564), has been profoundly influential in northern Europe and especially in the US (see sidebar). The early modern period left a variety of arrangements between church and state. In England and Denmark a state church has survived until the present day. In France and northern continental Europe there remained a tension between the principle that the state or monarch had significant authority over the church and the Catholic tendency to see the pope as a major influence on local ecclesial and even political life. Significant concordats were negotiated between the papacy and Napoleon (1801), Mussolini (1929), and Hitler (1933). Perhaps the most important developments were the revolutions in America (1776) and France (1789), which explicitly removed the assumption that the church should inevitably have some tie to the state. This marked the end of the era of Christendom in the West (see pages 131–133).
Building the City of God. St. Augustine contrasted the Human City, the secular realm, with the City of God, the realm of salvation. Woodblock print, French, 1486.
CALVIN AND THE STATE John Calvin accepted the distinction between civil and spiritual authority, but had an unusually high view of civil government, which existed to cherish the worship of God, defend piety and the church, form righteous human behavior, and promote peace. This approach underlay Puritan-inspired quests for a godly society in England and New England from the 1640s. But Calvin also recognized that rebellion may in extreme cases be permissible or even required.
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CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT Perhaps the best illustration of the different theories of justice (see main text) is capital punishment. Its principle is retributive. The opponents of capital punishment have often argued on distributive grounds— suggesting that mitigating circumstances should incline the justice system to mercy. There have always been misgivings about the impossibility of making amends in the case of wrongful conviction. But perhaps the strongest argument against capital punishment goes back to the restorative intent of monastic incarceration: if the point of discipline and punishment is the eventual restoration of the offender to community and reconciliation with the victim (or their family), capital punishment renders this impossible.
Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery by Lorenzo Lotto (1480–1556). Jesus stopped a crowd from stoning a woman caught in adultery, with the words “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8.7).
At the heart of the Christian faith lies forgiveness (Matt. 18.22)—the reconciliation between human beings and God made possible in Christ. It is this divine reconciliation that makes it possible for human beings to be reconciled with one another and the whole of creation. Sin is generally seen not as a disaster but as an opportunity to renew discipleship and community. Jesus outlines a specific model in the case of person-to-person sin: attempt to resolve the matter in private or, failing that, within the community of the faithful (Matt. 18.15–21). In a similar vein Paul chastises his readers for taking their disputes to the public courts (1 Cor. 6.1–7). In contrast to the stress on forgiveness, punishment has also been important in Christian reflections on justice. Here the most telling verse is the “law of retaliation”: “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” (Exod. 21.24). Although set in a context of limiting excessive penalties (“no more than an eye for an eye”), these words have often been taken to legitimize retribution. A distinction has usually been made between crime and sin. Some misdemeanors, such as adultery, are generally viewed as sins but not crimes, while the church has at times not viewed a breach of civil law as sinful—as when Christians helped Jews to flee the Nazis.
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Incarceration as part of a pattern leading to reconciliation began with monastic penance. Monks faced solitary confinement less as punishment than as a form of discipline leading to their being restored to community. Indeed, some would trace the origins of Christian ethics to the handbooks produced to help confessors find suitable forms of penance for those who acknowledged their sin. The North American tradition of calling prisons “penitentiaries” begins here: places where prisoners may repent and seek amendment of life. Here the link between punishment and forgiveness is inextricable. In its first millennium Christianity existed mainly in cultures where justice was retributive—crimes were punished by inflicting an equivalent penalty upon the perpetrator. More recently Christians have sought to introduce the idea of distributive justice, which seeks a fairer distribution of wealth and resources in order to alleviate the causes of crime. A contemporary development that harks back to early church practice is that of restorative justice, in which crime is seen as primarily a matter between two individuals rather than a concern of the state. By bringing perpetrators face to face with victims, and sometimes encouraging some form of restitution, the aim is to promote reconciliation and restoration of relationships.
HOWARD, FRY, AND PRISON REFORM The pioneer of prison reform was the Englishman John Howard (1726–1790), who was inspired by Jesus’ words: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me” (Matt. 25.36). Howard, a Calvinist, travelled widely in Europe reporting on prison conditions. He worked tirelessly to improve the frequently appalling conditions in British prisons, seeking to improve both the physical and mental health of inmates and the often disorderly and corrupt organization of the prisons themselves. The Angel of the Prisons was a name given to Elizabeth Fry by an early biographer. Fry’s activities led to improvements in British prisons, particularly for women, and her
Among Howard’s successors, Quakers were especially prominent, most notably Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845). Born into a wealthy banking family, her concern for prisoners was awakened by the preaching of William Savery, an American Quaker, in 1798. Fry was particularly appalled by the treatment of women prisoners and their children. Her campaigns from 1817 against inhumane conditions and capital punishment helped to bring significant reforms in 1823. Fry was also influential in the creation (1808) of the first asylums where the mentally ill could be cared for separately, rather than in prisons or parish poorhouses, an idea later also promoted in the US by Dorothea Dix (1802–1887). work was influential in Europe and North America. An opponent of the death penalty, she said that “punishment is not for revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal.”
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TRADE AND COMMERCE
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A Busy Marketplace by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (ca. 1564– 1638). The Calvinist Netherlands became a major commerical force in 17th-century Europe.
Christian attitudes toward trade and commerce have historically ranged from wholehearted endorsement to deep suspicion. Both views look to Genesis: on the one hand, God the creator is the archetypal worker and artisan, yet in the account of the Fall (Gen. 3), work in general seems to be a form of punishment. The Middle Ages saw the emergence of the tradition of the just price (see sidebar), while the biblical ban on usury, or lending at interest (Exod. 22.24), was maintained. At the time of the crusades and of the growth in international trade fairs, the difficulty of transporting large quantities of money encouraged the rise of banking. This was not in itself regarded as usury, and the papal banks became particularly influential.
GUILDS AND TRADES UNIONS Christian ethics have influenced workers’ associations since the Middle Ages. Inspired by New Testament models of communal self-support, guilds were associations of those engaged in a particular craft or trade. Guilds acquired privileges from governments and facilitated the transition from a commodity to a money economy. They were often regarded with suspicion by church hierarchies as a source of rival loyalties. One aspect of trades unionism represented a continuity with medieval guild tradition: it sought to defend and enhance the rights and conditions of workers by a collective process. On the other hand, it had a more utopian impulse to unite workers across class, gender, religious, race, and national boundaries to aspire to a better world and a transformation in the power-relationships of industry. Christians have been at the heart of both aspects of trades unionism since its origin. In 1834 a Methodist A “guild” window in Chartres cathedral, France, which was donated by members of a farriers’ guild. Guilds controlled the economies of many cities in medieval Europe and developed a threefold training of craftspeople from apprentice to journeyman and master.
preacher, George Loveless, formed a “friendly society” of farm workers in Dorset, England, who were subsequently arrested and transported to Australia for illegally swearing an oath. In the outcry that led to their release, they acquired a distinctly Christian nickname: the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Christians were later prominent in founding the British Labour Party: it was said that the party owed “more to Methodism than Marx.”
the reformation and the “protestant ethic” The Reformation saw attitudes begin to change. Usury came to be accepted, as long as the interest was not excessive. There was also a new perception that everyday occupations fell within the bounds of God’s kingdom. Both Luther and Calvin saw trade and commerce as part of an economy of grace, rather than simply as works of mercy. Luther in particular extended the notion of vocation to secular roles, thus bringing the world of commerce within the language of salvation. The term “Protestant [work] ethic” was coined by the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who argued that while Catholics were assured salvation by the sacraments and the blessing of the clergy, Protestants had no such assurance and so poured their religious zeal into their labor. With few legitimate ways of spending their gains—for example, purchasing church adornments was excluded and personal luxury frowned upon—surplus capital was invested, and hence Calvinism was one factor in the rise of capitalism and ultimately mass production. Weber’s thesis is highly perceptive. The key figure in economies shaped by Calvinist assumptions (notably in the US) was, and perhaps still is, the entrepreneur who sees his work as one of great moral purpose. Karl Marx saw religion as subject to the dominant force of economics; Weber saw economics as largely subject to the religious spirit. In recent years the ethical focus has been on three related issues. The first is globalization, whose benefits have brought goods, services, and employment across the world but appears to leave the many at the economic mercy of the few. The second is climate change and its economic implications. The third is debt relief, a movement to counter the tendency of the market to keep heavily indebted countries in a perpetual cycle of poverty.
THE “JUST PRICE” The medieval notion of the “just price” held that it was unethical to gain financially without actually creating something, and in particular that it was immoral to profiteer from market conditions of scarcity. In the words of Thomas Aquinas: “If someone would be greatly helped by something belonging to someone else, and the seller not similarly harmed by losing it, the seller must not sell for a higher price: because the usefulness that goes to the buyer comes not from the seller, but from the buyer’s needy condition: no one ought to sell something that does not belong to him.”
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POVERTY AND WELFARE
The Hôtel-Dieu in Beaune, Burgundy, founded in 1443 to care for the poor and sick. The medieval French tradition of calling hospitals and leper homes “Hôtels-Dieu” (“guesthouses of God”) shows how care for the sick arose naturally from the tradition of hospitality. Primacy was given to patients’ spiritual welfare (see also page 121).
Christian concern about poverty has roots in Israel’s tradition of expressing gratitude for God’s deliverance from slavery by caring for those whose neediness echoed Israel’s former condition—widows, orphans, and strangers (Deut. 10.18, 14.28–9). It is centrally drawn from the pattern of Jesus’ ministry: with no fixed home, he spent time among the poor and outcast and in conflict with the authorities. For Jesus, treatment of the poor is a significant aspect of eternal judgment (Matt. 25.31–46). For most of church history the Christian duty to the poor has been conducted through education and medicine (see pages 100–101 and 120–121). It is not simply that one needs an education to comprehend the Bible and to participate fully in the liturgy; it is also that education is the surest way for people to help themselves out of poverty. There has long been a debate between those who see poverty as humiliation, and thus an evil, and those who see it as an aspect of simplicity, and thus a vocation for some.
POVERTY AND WELFARE
The history of voluntary poverty goes back at least to St. Anthony in the fourth century; St. Francis is the most famous proponent of this tradition (see pages 42 and 45). With industrialization, urban poverty in particular, and the political responses to it, became a key ethical issue. Nineteenth-century German liberal theologians began to see the heart of the gospel not so much in Christ’s atonement but more in the inauguration of a new society, the kingdom of God, sometimes called the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God. In North America the Social Gospel movement of Walter Rauschenbusch in the early twentieth century picked up on this trajectory, which was further explored in Britain by Archbishop William Temple in Christianity and the Social Order (1942). state and private welfare In Europe such impulses became a significant part of the growing culture of state welfare provision, beginning in Germany in the 1880s and including the creation of the National Health Service in Britain in 1948. In the US, in contrast, the solution to poverty seemed to lie in private enterprise and personal charity. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and their Catholic Worker movement epitomized the way influential people sought to combine voluntary poverty with an expression of compassion in the tradition of the New Testament. In the twentieth century awareness of global poverty, sickness, and hunger grew with the development of mass communications. The 1960s saw the emergence of “liberation theology” (see sidebar), and movements for debt relief and fair trade, together with questions over feeding an expanding global population, became central to addressing some of the most characteristic issues of the twenty-first century.
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LIBERATION THEOLOGY What is termed “liberation theology” sprang from a conference of Latin American bishops in Medillin, Colombia, in 1968 onwards. Liberation theologians identified the exodus from slavery in Egypt as the central scriptural motif, and spawned a host of contextual theologies that began with reflection on the struggles of oppressed peoples, rather than with abstract theological ideas or traditions. For many Catholics and Protestants a certain style of social scientific diagnosis seemed integral to addressing poverty thereafter—although this reliance by Catholic theologians on economic analysis incurred the disapproval of the Vatican.
CHRISTIAN PHILANTHROPY: DR. BARNARDO Christian religious and moral education were central to the work of Dr. Thomas Barnardo (1845–1905), a pioneer of children’s welfare. At age sixteen, Dublin-born Barnardo had an evangelical conversion experience, influenced by his Plymouth Brethren mother and siblings. In 1866 he began to train as a doctor in London, with plans to become a missionary in China. However, the atrocious living conditions of London’s East End moved him to devote his life to helping destitute children. Barnardo’s first home, for boys, opened in London in 1870. While the religious motto of Barnardo’s Homes was “Christian, Protestant and Evangelical,” he accepted all destitute children regardless of background. His belief that
all children deserved a good start in life lay behind one of Barnardo’s more controversial policies, from a present-day perpective: emigrating children to Canada, Australia, and other parts of the British empire. Barnardo also established the first fostering scheme when he sent children from the pollution and sickness of urban slums to “good country homes,” mainly working-class families who had to agree to raise the child with kindness and moral rectitude: regular prayer and church or chapel attendance formed part of the contract. In an age when many of his contemporaries saw poverty as a shameful result of laziness or vice, Barnardo’s greatest legacy was perhaps his refusal to deny care to those who needed it, irrespective of the causes of their destitution.
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HEALTH AND MEDICINE
HEALTH AND MEDICINE
Caring for the Sick, from an Italian manuscript of ca. 1300. The model for early hospitals was the way in which monks cared for their own sick. Operated by specialist monks or lay brothers, monastic infirmaries generally had beds in long halls, with a chapel at one end or close by. Patients received medical care, a special diet, and other assistance to enable them to return to the monastic community.
A concern for the sick has always been close to the heart of Christian mission, and the question at the last judgment, “When was it that we saw you sick and visited you?” (Matt. 25.39), has motivated countless deeds of mercy. Three terms stand out in the history of medicine within the Christian tradition. The first is “care.” Medicine for most of church history has fundamentally been the practice of care for those whose cure was in doubt. Care and prayer are central to the Christian response to illness (James 5.13–14). In recent times, the expectation of cure has increased for a wide range of conditions, and the primacy of caring over curing has become a key ethical issue, while conditions not previously considered “medical,” such as infertility, childbirth, or advanced age, have increasingly been brought within a medical frame of reference. The second key term is the virtue implied in the word “patient” (from Latin pati, “suffer,” “endure”). Medicine has remained a moral practice rather than an economic
ABORTION Abortion is perhaps the most controversial medical issue for Christians today. Broadly four reasons for therapeutic abortion come under ethical and legal scrutiny: to save the woman’s life; to preserve her physical or mental health (this can include nonconsensual conception); to prevent the birth of a child with a congenital disorder that would be fatal or associated with significant morbidity; or to reduce the number of fetuses in cases of multiple pregnancy. There are also elective abortions that fall outside these criteria. The general prohibition on abortion remains largely constant in Christian history. The traditional line is upheld by Catholicism (latterly by Pope John Paul II in 1995), but in Protestant discussions of the issue some or all of the four The image of a fetus on a tapestry of the Virgin Mary during the “March for Life” at the US Supreme Court on January 22, 2008, an anti-abortion protest on the 35th anniversary of the court’s 1973 Roe vs Wade decision that legalized abortion in the US.
therapeutic criteria are more often regarded as legitimate. Few Christian traditions have entertained elective abortions outside these therapeutic circumstances. In US public life “pro-life” and “pro-choice” factions have become polarized, and constitute the most visible presence of religious questions in the political sphere.
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transaction so long as the physician has remembered the duty of care and the patient has remembered to be exactly that—patient or enduring. Patience in this sense rests on a conviction of providence—that life is lived in the palm of God’s hand. Some have argued that medicine no longer rests on this kind of faith, and has become a “religion” all of its own. The third key term, “hospitality,” rests on Hebrews 13.2: “Show hospitality to strangers, for thus have some entertained angels unawares.” Hospitality relates to the foregoing idea of patience in the sense that the sick were in the care, above all, of divine providence. A “hospital” was once a place where one was, literally, a guest of God (see page 118). ethics and modern medicine The combination of scientific advance and the transformation of public perception have evoked a host of dilemmas. Some of these concern the distribution of resources—so that what can be done, can be done to more than just a few. Others concern the propriety of medical intervention in areas, particularly concerning the beginning and end of life, which for many centuries had been thought of as simply God’s domain. For example, if a couple cannot conceive naturally, is it right for conception to be medically assisted? Is it right for eggs fertilized outside the womb to be frozen and kept indefinitely, or used for other purposes? Such issues are a challenge to pastors and theologians, because they raise questions of why Christians have children; whether every setback in life should look to a medical or technological solution; and whether there are some interventions that come closer to the nature and purpose of life than humans should tread without great fear.
THE LIFE TO COME When confidence in the resurrection of the body was almost universal, a long and healthy life first time around was not the only or even the most important thing to be wished for: the real life was the one to come. Medicine rose to prominence at about the same time that confidence in the life to come began to falter. Many have now come to see medicine as at risk of being transformed from a practice conducted by those whose faith in the life to come enabled them to cope with the tragedies of this life, into a new “religion” that seeks to extend this present life for as long as possible.
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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
THE CHURCH AND GALILEO For the Roman Catholic Church, the heliocentric theory of Copernicus and Galileo (see main text) was contrary to scripture (such as Ps. 93.1, 104.5), but it was permissible to discuss such ideas as long as one did not advocate them, which would be heretical. In 1616 Galileo was warned not to “hold or defend” his theory. He endeavored to obey, but his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) appeared to ridicule the prevailing Aristotelian geocentric view, and Galileo was tried by the Inquisition for heresy. Forced to recant and banned from publishing further works, Galileo spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Viewing the Heavens. Father Emmanuel Carreira operates the telescope at the Vatican Observatory in Castelgandolfo, south of Rome, June 23, 2005. The Vatican Observatory is one of the world’s oldest astronomical institutes. Contrary to popular assumptions, the Roman Catholic Church has long promoted scientific enquiry, with Jesuits at the forefront of Catholic scientific endeavor for 450 years.
Many today see Christianity and science as constituting rival claims to truth. But thinkers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas articulated a healthy respect for nonscriptural disclosures of wisdom and insight. For such theologians the more that could be found out about God’s creation, the more that could be learned about God. The birth of the modern university arguably lay in setting aside the view that human weakness is primarily due to sin, and instead asserting that human limitations are largely due to lack of knowledge. By the seventeenth century, one can discern a watershed. Prior to that time, a “discovery” usually meant the unearthing of an ancient manuscript from the Classical era. After that time, discovery meant the finding of something altogether new—a new element, theory, or cure. One key figure was Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who pioneered a systematic approach to investigating natural phenomena. Bacon’s work was a landmark in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science. Another significant role was played by Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), with his work on fluids and the concepts of vacuum and pressure, together with his major contribution to mathematics. Isaac Newton (1643–1727), most famous for his three laws of motion, was a third towering figure who, like Pascal and Bacon, saw his work as being well within the sphere of Christianity. Indeed for most of the
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period up until the later nineteenth century, a clash between Christianity and science was avoided by a gradual modification in Christianity’s claims concerning the natural world. challenges to tradition Nonetheless the twentieth-century confrontation between conservative Christianity and modern science was not without precedent. For example, the philosophy of David Hume (1711–1776) is based on a rejection of the widely held assumption that human minds were miniature versions of the divine mind. Key moments were the discovery, originally by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) and confirmed by Galileo (1564–1642; see sidebar), that the Earth went round the sun (heliocentrism); and Darwin’s theory that human beings and apes were descended from a common ancestor (see box). Copernicus’ discovery meant that humanity was no longer at the center of the universe, Darwin’s that humans were no longer inherently different from other animals and therefore by implication superior to them. Both ideas directly challenged biblical sources. The legacy of such developments tends to be either a Christian ethic that places science and technology in a place of honor, in relation to which ethics must constantly adjust, or an interiorization of Christianity to a private, “spiritual” realm, with relatively little claim on external physical realities.
DARWIN AND DARWINISM In 1859 Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published The Origin of Species. Its argument, that all species have evolved over time through the process of “natural selection,” soon became accepted as the foundation of biology, providing as it did a unified theory of the diversity of life. Darwin’s work sparked fierce debates. Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, asked T.H. Huxley if he was descended from apes on his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side; Huxley replied he “would rather be descended from an ape
than from a cultivated man who used his gifts of culture and eloquence in the service of prejudice and falsehood.” Darwin’s theories were at the heart of a famous trial in 1925, when John Scopes, a high school teacher in Tennessee, was charged with teaching evolution. Scopes lost the case, and the trial has come to epitomize the battle between fundamentalism and science. In recent years similar controversies in the US have centered on a new form of anti-Darwinian creationist theory known as “intelligent design.”
Darwin as a monkey, an English cartoon of 1861 satirizing the theory of evolution. However, Darwin never stated that humans were descended from apes, nor—while he did abandon Christianity—did he
ever profess to be an atheist. Many Christians were open to Darwin’s theory: thus for Frederick Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury, it showed God’s purpose “in the slow workings of natural causes.”
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opposite Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in the Song of Songs. Christian tradition regards this work as an allegory of the love of Christ for the church, but ostensibly it presents a love affair between a man and woman. From the Winchester Bible, English, ca.1150–1180.
The tendency in the Old Testament is to regard marriage and family life as a sign of God’s blessing. In the New Testament, however, the time is short and the urgency of mission is great: thus singleness is seen as the norm. Anxiety about sexual excess surfaces in many places in the New Testament, but what made the Christian ethic unusual was that it regarded unchastity for a man as severely as unchastity for a woman. This made marriage much safer for women than in other contemporary traditions. The early church was not clear whether divorce was ever permissible, since the New Testament is not entirely transparent. For example, when Jesus says “anyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of unchastity, causes her
CONTRACEPTION AND HOMOSEXUALITY Contraception and homosexuality remain two of the most potent issues that continue to divide Christians. At the 1930 Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Communion formally recognized the appropriate use of certain forms of contraception. However, the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae ruled out any form of contraception for Roman Catholics other than the rhythm method, and this remains the church’s view. Most other Protestant churches permit contraception so long as it does not lead to promiscuity. Many conservative churches would allow it only within marriage, a position similar to the broad consensus within the Orthodox Church. Homosexuality is even more divisive, as shown by events in 2003. The election that year of Gene Robinson, a man living in an active relationship with a same-sex partner, as Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, was welcomed by many, but aroused intense opposition in more traditionalist, conservative parts of the Anglican Communion, particularly, but by no means exclusively, in Africa. The Right Reverend Gene Robinson is invested as 9th Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire at St. Paul’s Episcopal church in Concord, New Hampshire, on March 7, 2004. Robinson’s appointment was controversial in the wider Anglican Communion, in which he became the first openly homosexual bishop.
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to commit adultery; and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Matt. 5.32), it is not clear whether or not divorce is comprehensively ruled out, or whether or not remarriage is assumed. The goods of marriage, as they emerged through the early centuries, were the bearing and rearing of children, the channeling and enjoyment of physical desire, and the making of a special bond of holy friendship. The major transformation in the Western church brought about by Pope Gregory VII (1073–1085; see page 39) profoundly affected marriage. It increasingly began to be regarded as a sacrament, and release from its bonds required ecclesiastical consent. Clergy were finally forbidden to marry in 1139. Nonetheless, until relatively recent times most marriages were ones of social convention, entered into without a formal ecclesial ceremony. sex and marriage Two themes have shaped the discussion of sex and sexuality throughout church history. The first is the degree to which sexual passion is a holy gift, to be channeled appropriately, or a destructive power, to be harnessed by the disciplines of marriage. The second is the extent to which marriage and embodied love are matters of social custom, adaptable to local cultural expression, or unalterable forms of life revealed in the New Testament. There remains a tension between the latter’s affirmation of love and the body (as Eph. 5.28–33) and its identification of singleness as the norm for Christians. In the modern era a number of factors have tended to dismantle the notion of marriage as an unalterable given. Longer life expectancy and the greater economic independence of women made divorce seem increasingly possible and sometimes necessary. The profound shift from economic unavoidability to romantic urgency as the basis for a relationship, at least in the West, has likewise influenced cultural expectations about sex before marriage and remarriage after divorce. Reliable birth control has made childbearing seem less inherent to the role of wife, while sexual encounters for the unmarried may have come to seem less dangerous or furtive and indeed, in some groups today, almost routine. In a secular culture where sex had come to be regarded as a natural, even therapeutic, expression of feeling, rather than a dangerous force for the subversion of social and personal stability, it became logical, for many, to affirm sexual expression among those attracted to their own sex. All these developments have caused enormous heartsearching for churches, and remain largely unresolved areas in Christian teaching and practice (see box).
GOD AND SEXUALITY New Testament texts (such as Mark 10, Eph. 5.28–33) reflect the ambiguity about whether marriage, gender, and sexuality reflect the way God has ordered creation, or, more significantly, the way God has entered history to draw all people to himself, as in the following famous passage: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal. 3.28)
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THE REFORMATION AND WAR While generally a strong opponent of war, Martin Luther was outraged by atrocities committed during the Peasant’s Revolt and supported the nobles who suppressed it in 1525. Huldrych Zwingli (1484– 1531) died on the battlefield. These and other conflicts that followed the religious division of western Europe, especially the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598) and the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), were as brutal as any hitherto seen in Europe, and in the eyes of later philosophers such as Immanuel Kant significantly discredited claims for the place of Christianity in public life.
Rows of crosses in the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy, France, mark the graves of soldiers who died in the Allied invasion of France in 1944. In combating the naked aggression of a violent regime, the conflict against Nazism and Japanese imperialism has been seen by many as a classic example of the Augustinian “just war,” at least in its motivation.
The Old Testament includes accounts of wars in which God is sometimes viewed as fighting with and for Israel. By contrast the New Testament appears to have no room for the notion of fighting. Jesus tells his followers to love their enemies and avoid retaliation (Luke 6.27–29.) When Peter cuts off the servant’s ear in Gethsemane, Jesus rebukes him and criticizes those who live by the sword (Matt. 26.52). Marcion (ca. 110–160) tried to resolve the conflict between the two testaments by suggesting that the God of the Old Testament was a vengeful despot and the God of the New was a God of love. But the early church rejected this view as failing to demonstrate the way in which the two were still the same God. Many, probably most, early Christians saw a direct connection between their refusal to worship the Roman emperor and their refusal to fight for him. Christians saw a conflict between Greco-Roman virtue, which presupposed military expression, and Christian virtue, which presupposed peace. With the coming of the Christian empire in the fourth century, different opportunities and responsibilities began to affect the thinking of theologians. Augustine began to develop a set of criteria—later developed by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645)—by which, given their predisposition to pacifism, Christians may
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in exceptional circumstances consider a war to be just (see box). The medieval world tended to perceive a division between the religious (such as monks), who followed the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount, with its injunction to love one’s enemies, and the worldly, who followed a less binding ethic. The crusades (see pages 48–49) are often seen today as a low watermark in the Christian practice of war: the ultimate end of reclaiming the holy places was taken to justify all sorts of shameful means. nonresistance and resistance The nonresistant voice gained a new hearing in Protestant groups that arose in the 1500s and 1600s, through what are now known as the historic peace churches—the Brethren, the Mennonites, and the Quakers. But the great reformers such as Luther and Calvin, while viewing war as evil, were not pacifists (see sidebar). The twentieth century introduced three new dimensions into the question of war. The specter of nuclear war made it seem unlikely that the good that might be achieved could ever outweigh the damage done. The influence of Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) in the struggle for Indian independence gave attention to nonviolence as a prudential, rather than simply a principled, strategy. And the arms trade emerged as a subject for ethical reflection and an integral part of the imaginative world that made war seem, to many, an inevitable part of human relationships.
AUGUSTINE AND “JUST WAR” St. Augustine identified three dimensions to war: when to fight (ius ad bellum); how to fight (ius in bello); and when to stop (ius post bellum). A decision when to fight requires a legitimate authority (such as a government or the UN), a right intention (restoration of a suffered harm, such as a territorial invasion), and an overwhelming balance of injustice on one side. In such circumstances, the authority, having exhausted all other avenues, with a strong probability of success and a high expectation that the good to be achieved will outweigh the inevitable damage, may consider the declaration of a war to be just. A just war should be conducted with due discrimination (avoiding harm to noncombatants—a major problem for nuclear and other “weapons of mass destruction”), with due proportionality (avoiding reckless damage), and minimum force. Easter at War. US army chaplain Captain Daniel Bucur leads troops in an Easter service in central Baghdad, Iraq, in April 2003.
In recent times criteria for ending wars have been proposed. These seek to avoid revenge, vindictive treatment of those not responsible for the hostilities, and exclusion from the international community. They promote processes such as apology, compensation, and war crimes trials.
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THE EARTH AND ALL THAT IS IN IT In his On Christian Doctrine, Augustine drew an influential distinction between those things humans should “use” and those things humans should “enjoy.” The latter were the abundant gifts of God, that never run out, and enjoying them was participating in the worship of God. The former were available to serve the latter. A tension that runs through the history of Christian ethics concerns whether the nonhuman creation is to be “used” or “enjoyed.” That tension has become a matter of intense debate in recent times due to the deepening sense of an ecological crisis. There are broadly four dimensions to the contemporary crisis in the environment. The most publicized issue is the overwhelming evidence of climate change, with a host of ancillary causes (such as the burning of fossil fuels) and effects (such as the reduction in the polar icecaps and rising sea levels).
ST. FRANCIS: PATRON OF THE ENVIRONMENT One of the most inspirational figures for Christians, and indeed others, with an interest in humankind’s relationship to the natural world is Francesco di Bernardone (1182–1286), better known as St. Francis of Assisi. Coming from a privileged background, Francis devoted himself to a life of poverty and to the formation of the order of Friars Minor, or Franciscans (see page 45). Francis is widely commemorated for his love of creation. He famously once preached to the birds, telling them always to praise God. On another occasion he went up into the mountains above Gubbio and persuaded a wolf which had terrorized the townspeople to come down and be reconciled with them. His poem Canticle of the Sun refers to “Brother Sun,” “Sister Moon,” and “Mother Earth.” His what in modern terms would be called environmentalist inclinations and his love of peace make Francis a major figure in Christian reflection on ecology.
St. Francis Preaches to the Birds. The spirituality of St. Francis focused on Jesus’ human life and on delight in God in this world. One day he is said to have spoken to the birds flying above him: “My brothers, you ought to praise and love your Creator greatly. He clothed you with feathers and gave you wings to fly and the clear air as your dwelling, and he cares for you though you have neither to sow nor to reap.” From a 15th-century manuscript.
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There are at least three other issues besides global warming. One is the rapid depletion of species diversity, currently estimated at tens of thousands annually. This has causes such as deforestation, extensive deep-sea fishing, and the widespread use of pesticides and herbicides. Another is soil erosion and desertification, related to poor farming methods, overgrazing, and the use of inappropriate land for crop production. And finally there is the damage caused by chemical pollutants to global ecosystems. christians and creation Christian ethics responds to this crisis first by drawing on the theological theme of creation. Within the Genesis account (see pages 70–71) there are two dimensions, sometimes seen in tension with one another. One is that humanity is called to dominate and subdue the nonhuman creation, as Genesis 1.28 might suggest. The other dimension suggests that humanity is called to live in harmony with the nonhuman creation, with mutually beneficial results, as in Genesis 2.15. A second key theological theme in relation to issues of ecology is that of resurrection. A foundational article by the historian Lynn White, “The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (1967), put the blame for the alienation of the Christian imagination from the created world on early modern mechanistic views of the universe. But blame has also been directed at views of salvation that seem to save humanity from the physical world, rather than for a renewed world. The resurrection, by which God in Christ is restored to a world made new, affirms the creation by showing how the Earth is permanently a part of God’s destiny for humanity and all creation. One particularly problematic area for Christian ethics is the question of whether humanity is genuinely in the center of God’s purposes, or whether the nonhuman (or even inanimate) creation has its own value independent of its usefulness to human flourishing. Perhaps the most controversial area in this regard is the status of animals. The areas in question include the hunting of wild animals, notably foxes, the intensification of breeding and slaughter systems, and the use of animals for scientific or cosmetic experimentation. While many Christians would be comfortable with the premature ending of the life of an animal to achieve a direct human benefit, so long as the animal was well cared for in its lifetime and suffered minimal distress, others would regard animals as moral subjects in much the same way as humans, and would rule out all killing or maltreatment of animals.
A vegetable garden in downtown Seattle, Washington, part of the city’s community garden program, which promotes the use of urban land for communal cultivation by organic methods. Christian concern for the environment is inspired by Genesis: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” (Gen. 2.15)